The cats would curl on his lap, but he ignored them. They purred less. They looked for love elsewhere.
The book took him three weeks, and when it was over he wept, because his time with Bertha was over. He looked around the cupola and saw how wild he’d gone, the empty bottles, the stink of his body. Of course that was why he’d sent the child out of the house. He had a memory of pissing down the speaking tube. Let the house fall to ruin: it had anyhow.
He sent the manuscript off to his publisher, changed the name of the house to Supersum—that which is left behind, superfluous—and went to the shuttered bowling alley, to sleep on Bertha’s lane.
2
An Alley Marriage
Joe Wear knew two people who died in the Molasses Flood: Bertha Truitt and a Scotsman named Virgil Fraser who (according to the Salford Bugle) had been working in the navy shipyard as a builder. It was Virgil who’d taught Joe Wear wood; it was Virgil’s death that devastated him. When Joe Wear saw the name listed among the dead in the afternoon paper he took to his bed, sick with longing. Not for Virgil as he was—they had not seen each other in twenty years, the math was astonishing—but the young Virgil, the younger Virgil, with whom Joe Wear had shared a bed for some days when they were on the razzle (as Virgil had called it), drunk as newts (as Virgil said). Joe was sixteen. Virgil might have been twenty-three, or thirty-two, or forty-five. (His age was in the paper: he died at fifty-two. So thirty-six, when he and Joe had known each other.) They’d met when Virgil’d come to the Les Miserables house to repair the maple approaches for the alleys, and Joe was a teenage pinboy. The first night they’d drunk and slept and woken up in the same bed, that was all. Virgil’s room was at the top of the building, made smaller by a mansard roof and larger by a dormer window that overlooked Scollay Square. The second night Joe woke up in the dark to that question of young love, but in Virgil’s burled voice: Are you awake? Beneath the slant of the eaves Joe was not sure what the right answer was—neither which answer was true (was he awake?) nor which might lead to what he wanted to happen, which was for Virgil to take: what. Liberties, or Joe himself. He wanted Virgil to take. Virgil put his mouth to the back of Joe Wear’s head. Joe thought it was a kiss though it was slipshod. Then Virgil bit him on the shoulder: wake up. Well. Joe turned over. “There you are,” said Virgil, reaching down, taking hold of Joe matter-of-factly, “and there you are.”
Virgil kept his thinning hair cropped so close you could only see what he had left—a magnificent head, a pair of rococo ears—not what he had lost. Days, Joe went to work and set pins. Nights, he took drunken inventory. The staves of Virgil’s ribs were prominent in his barrel chest. He was missing two fingers, half a thumb, and three toes. It seemed rude to ask where they’d gone, and Joe—leaning back off the single bed, peering at the elevated train tracks, Virgil’s incomplete hands clamped on his shoulders—was holding on to what manners he had. He’d always laughed at his Irish aunt’s clinging to the scraps of linen that had come over with her (handkerchiefs, soiled napkins), but now he understood that you clung to what survived. If it had survived, it was durable enough. It might be the making of you.
Virgil never asked Joe, either, the cause of his rolling, irregular walk. People always wanted to know, as though they could not make sense of Joe himself, could not hear a word he said, without that piece of information. As though he were a different person depending on the timing of the event: before birth, at birth, childhood, last year. Depending on the cause: in utero shock, a violent father, a runaway horse, an act of bravery or cowardice, fate, luck, fault.
“Don’t worry, lad,” said Virgil in the morning, seeing Joe’s stunned face. “You’ll outgrow it, you’ll be fine.”
Then came the afternoon of his monthly appointment with his maiden aunt Rose, who’d visited Joe in the Dolbeer Home for Destitute Children but had never taken him home. They were the last of the family, she liked to remind him, she too old and he too odd to marry and have children. An old maid and a cripple: the family would wither. In the meantime she lived in a round room at the prow of a pie-cut building near Copley Square. “My turret,” she called it, though it was on the second floor, and instead of a moat she looked down into the triangular interior of a Rexall sign.
Monthly they met at Shaw’s cafeteria, where Rose liked the chop suey and Joe got the chipped beef. She was not so very old, not even forty, though she had the high color and querulous voice of a woman of eighty. He thought she had been married once—her name was Rose Friant; he’d been told his mother’s maiden name had been Daisy Crump—but like Virgil’s digits the missing Mr. Friant seemed a subject too personal to broach.
“An appetite!” said Aunt Rose, watching Joe eat. “You’re usually such a persnickety fellow.” Her eyes were bright and teasing. “Are you in love?”
It was true that he ordinarily extracted his chipped beef shard by shard from the cream sauce; it was true that today he ate with so little attention to anything that his shirt cuff trailed in his plate and painted the table. Now that she’d called attention to it he saw that he’d eaten the lot. She was still ferrying bits of celery, ribbed like her stockings, to her careful mouth.
Love: what a thing. To kiss a man and grab a man and to give yourself over to a man—that was something (as Virgil said) that was perfectly normal. Plenty of it at the Dolbeer Home in his childhood. A game you’d outgrow, and, like all games, sometimes childish fun and sometimes overwhelming fun and sometimes unasked for, awful, shameful. But love: that was the perversion, he understood. That is what would keep you out of Aunt Rose’s heaven. Joe shook his head and gnawed at the side of his thumb.
They sat near the plate glass windows by the street. The world was bright. Joe despised it.
“One day, Joe,” said Aunt Rose. “Here—what goes on? Your thumb.”
He took his thumb from his mouth and examined it. “A splinter,” he said, surprised to see it. He showed her.
“Well, don’t use your mouth,” said Rose, “your mouth is filthy.” With one hand she took hold of his thumb, and with the other she rummaged through her purse. Maiden aunts have supplies in case of shipwreck, sewing kits, horehound drops, dry socks, so that they might earn their place on the lifeboat. She produced a needle and, without asking, began to coax the splinter from the side of Joe Wear’s thumb.
“Be brave,” she told the thumb.
“I will,” said Joe himself.
“You always are.” She did not look at him. “There.” She wiped the splinter away on the ivory napkin on her lap, then turned his hand over and gasped. “Riddled with them. Joe! Didn’t this hurt?”
He wasn’t sure.
She moved her chair closer to his. What did other people see? A woman old enough to be the boy’s mother holding his hand, a boy too old to have his hand held. A gypsy reading a palm. A man and woman joined in some sort of serious enterprise. A good woman praying for a sinner’s soul. A sinning woman asking for absolution. Joe Wear felt flush with guilt, not for what he had done with Virgil Fraser in a rented room near Scollay Square but for bringing it here, into the lap of Rose Friant, now fishing splinter after splinter from his hand with such care you might think each a relic of the true cross. One by one she dug them out—“now the other,” she said, “the other hand, Joe”—and set them on the napkin and clucked. His hands were so calloused it mostly didn’t hurt, though every now and then she dug past the armored skin to the layer where he lived. Where did the splinters come from? The pins, the balls, the approaches; the bedrails, the dormer window frame, the bentwood chair, the tiny desk, the boardinghouse floor; swapped over direct from Virgil Fraser’s own splintered body. All of those places. You could not tell which splinter came from where. You could not keep them apart and you could not tell them apart. He wanted to wrench his hand away from his aunt and run from Shaw’s and back to Scollay Square: he later thought it the greatest act of bravery that he stayed put.
“You could build a boat,” she said at the end, but she didn’t let go of hi
s hand. What would she have done, had she known where those hands had been? Had he even washed them? She patted the inside of his wrist and looked at him with those very blue eyes, bluer because bloodshot, and said, “It’s all right, Joe. You might meet a girl who doesn’t care. Shake my hand!”
“What?”
“Shake it. You can tell a man’s character by his handshake.” She closed her eyes assessingly. Then she opened them and looked at the splinters on the napkin. “Don’t forget me, Joe. You owe me a kindness. Androcles and the lion.”
What had she divined about his character? He said, though he did not remember, “My mother used to tell me that story.”
She smiled piteously at him. The pity was because he still believed that his mother and her stories belonged only to him. She said, at last, “I know she did.”
That afternoon at Les Miserables he got into a fever of pinsetting, set them so fast all the other pinboys sat back and watched him swing from pit to pit, standing the pins on the plates, tossing the ones that had split and grabbing new, sanding the bottoms on the fly so they’d keep their balance. It was true that the pins reminded him of Virgil Fraser, it seemed certain that he would never be able to take hold of a bowling pin in all innocence again. How had he ever? What they’d done had seemed necessary, incendiary in the room; it still seemed incendiary, and he was worried that he might burst into flames, and the cause of death would be sodomy. That was the word that came into his head. It was biblical. He had never read the Bible. Maiden aunt Rose would find out and send the news via prayer to her dead sister. Even so he wanted to go back to Virgil Fraser and the hard smell of him, his knockabout affection. The bentwood chair, the dormer, the bed. It was this that shamed him, not that he’d done such things but that he’d do them again, and he the only hope of his family.
He was burning. Was it with shame or love? Either might kill him. Physical pain, too: he knew in the morning he would be laid low with spasming muscles, unable to climb back on the shelf before the balls came at him. (There was a meanness at Les Miserables. The bowlers sometimes aimed balls at the pinboys for laughs.) He hoped every snatch of a pin replaced one of the splinters that had been stolen from him: he could touch nobody with his tender tended hands, including Virgil Fraser, a man who now seemed made of wood: barrel staves, bowling pins, sanded or ebonized or unvarnished. His sawdust breath.
After Joe came off his shift, he quit Les Miserables. He would walk away from this life and begin again. He would find a job where he was beneath notice or desire, where nobody would aim a weapon or a look at him. At the end of the week he found a job in Salford, a city five miles away, in a cemetery, surrounded by the dead, who (it turned out) did not withhold judgment. As I am now, so you shall be. Weep not for me. She was without sin. The dead were arranged by families, husbands next to first and second wives, unmarried people buried at the feet of their parents, all these stones paid for by somebody, after all. A crowd of dead people was as much a crowd as a bowling alley, he thought, until the morning he found a live woman amid the stones. He went to visit her at the hospital, and there she offered him a job, and lodging, and her odd smile, offered her hand for shaking. He took it.
You can tell a man’s character from his handshake, Aunt Rose had said. He didn’t know about a woman’s. Her hand felt like rock maple; his own, as though Rose with her needle had drawn out not splinters but his very bones. This woman was offering him escape from Virgil Fraser, his corrupting, compelling influence, the particular smell of him, his dangerous jokes, his ruinous affection—was it affection or was it just pastime for Virgil? He had known the minute Virgil Fraser had turned him over in bed that he was at a fork in the road, yes, no, and that his life would be made of such forks: he just didn’t know he’d come to another so quick.
“Will you join me,” said Bertha Truitt, as though it were not a question but persuasion, and then that’s what it was. “Do a good job,” she said, “and one day the business will come to you.”
Joe Wear left behind his rented room and moved to the apartment above Truitt’s Alleys, where he thought of Virgil Fraser hourly. Then daily. Then, after some years, weekly. Then only when he was startled by a tall bowlegged man coming through the front door: Virgil’s here for me at last, he’d think, nearly leaping over the counter and into the arms of the stranger.
In January of 1919, Joe Wear lay in bed in his room over the alley and grieved alone. Nobody knocked on his door. Nobody told him what was expected of him. For the death of Bertha Truitt, Old Levi would be given flowers, and bunting, and notes of sympathy. Actual sympathy. What would Joe Wear get? He had not said the name Virgil Fraser aloud in nearly twenty years, or ever. He had gone to see Aunt Rose at Shaw’s every week, until she had fallen in love with a widower with three small children, she had become a mother, she had moved to New Hampshire to begin her life. If he had given up Virgil for her (though Virgil had not been his to give up), if he had given up not just another life, but life itself, how could she have left him for the bald and birdish Mr. Birch, who owned a choker of summer cabins ringed round a lake?
She had, though. Come stay in a cabin, she told him. What would Joe Wear do in a cabin? All she owned, the coral necklace, the fine Irish linen, the sense of propriety: it would be left to her stepchildren.
Do a good job and one day the business will come to you.
“Don’t fall in love with that woman!” Aunt Rose had warned him twenty years ago, when he’d told her about Bertha Truitt. She did not believe that women should own businesses. But if he had fallen in love, or at least into marriage, the alleys would now belong to him.
He’d asked her only once how she’d come to be in the cemetery. After a pause she’d said, “You’re an orphan, Joe, aren’t you?” “Yes.” “Well, I was orphaned from myself.” “I don’t know what that means,” he said, but he did. A terrible thing to be orphaned from yourself. Why he and Truitt had an understanding: they both had been.
“Orphaned from myself,” said Truitt, “and so I left myself on the front doorstep of God. But you found me first.” “And your husband.” “First, Joe Wear. I always remember you found me first.”
One day the business will come to you.
She had said that. He was certain. It had seemed a preposterous promise when she made it, but Truitt had turned out to be a preposterous and trustworthy human being. If you looked hungry she would have a turkey dinner delivered. If you admired her hat she would have it duplicated for you, even if you were not in the habit of wearing ladies’ hats. She lived in a world not of sips of whiskey but cases, not of sandwiches but roast pigs.
He stood up in his bed and leaned on the iron headboard. He could feel the springs beneath his feet. All those days in bed had turned his muscles to starched sheets. They hurt to move. He wondered whether they’d hold him.
In his absence, he was certain, Truitt’s Alleys had stayed idle. The pins would have been cleared into the pits at the end of the night, the balls rolled back along the returns, the ashtrays emptied and stacked and left so for days. Old Levi wouldn’t have opened it, nor Jeptha Arrison. Only Joe. There might be a scrim of handprints, noseprints, on the plate glass window, bowlers wondering when Truitt’s Alleys might rouse itself, if ever, now that its mistress was gone.
Maybe he owned it. Maybe the business had come to him.
He went crotcheting down to open the alley under his own orders.
Somebody had hung a wreath of roses and carnations on the door, and a black ribbon on the door handle. Joe hesitated, then removed the ribbon and got his keys out.
The place would need a full scrub: he would have to enlist Jeptha Arrison. No, he thought, he would do it himself, this first time. It might be a kind of ceremony. It might be just the exercise his body needed. He went to the corner to punch on the lights and then saw, in the corner, like a ghost, Old Levi sitting in the dark. He turned to look at Joe and gave a small forbidding nod. Joe turned the lights on anyhow.
“Open for bus
iness, you think?” Joe asked.
The same unfathomable nod.
Joe Wear had never liked Old Levi, the way he kowtowed to Bertha and at the same time was so full of himself, walked right in like he owned the place. Acted like he didn’t care what Joe Wear thought about him. It would be bad for business, a brooding drunk colored man in the corner. He’d aged in the way of furniture, Joe saw: threadbare in places so you could see the angles of his frame, creaking at the joints, and all his padding shifted.
“You happy there?” Joe Wear asked.
Old Levi held the sides of the round table, waiting. “I’m not happy anywhere,” he said at last.
If Bertha had left a will—surely she would have, she would never miss a chance to explain exactly what she gave away and to whom and in what quantity—she would not have left the alley to Old Levi, who would find it an albatross. He wouldn’t want it; she wouldn’t give it to him. Nor to their little daughter. There would be a will and it would be read. Until then—
“—I’m not fired,” Joe said.
“Not fired, no.” Old Levi’s voice was mild as milk, as though to cool the fire in Joe Wear’s. “You go ahead and open.”
“Listen, Sprague—”
“Doctor Sprague,” he said. So he did care, at least a little. “If you are seeking employment elsewhere—”
“No, Levi, I ain’t. I’m not fired?”
“Not fired,” said Dr. Sprague, irked at the fellow’s tone. But the point was to keep Bertha’s alley as it was, and that required this fool.
They both looked toward the front door, saw the three women goggling their eyes with their hands, peering in. They’d been drawn by the lights of the alley, on for the first time in two weeks. Now they straightened up and turned their backs, as though they’d only stopped on the sidewalk for conversation.
“Don’t worry, Mr. Wear,” said Dr. Sprague, so polite it sounded insulting. “I’ll die soon enough.”
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